At the recent HR Directors’ Forum, organised by the IOD, Workthing facilitated a roundtable discussion about how best to maximise investment in people for competitive advantage. This is what senior managers and HR chiefs said.

Click here » for executive summary.

Workthing: What is the biggest issue that HR has to control in order to get value from its people investment?

Barbara Oldridge, HR director, Research International ”The aspect of HR that concerns me most is getting senior management to understand the value of good people management. The evolution of our strategy is for line mangers to take responsibility for all things HR and to be the best advocates for HR.”
Michael Short, director, Learning Cortex “The problem for me is that HR doesn't understand what it controls. The real issue is about knowledge and the question is: is that owned by the business or by HR? Our evolutionary strategy should have an ‘r’ in front of it making it Revolutionary. The goal is for HR to disappear. In our view, HR is not an investment, nor can it be seen as something positive in its own right - its essence is about transferring skills to where they matter most.”
Amanda Wooding, director, people development, Smiths Group "Most people are of the view that HR’s activities should be decentralised - for people management and administration to be handled further down the line by line managers. What we need to do is to bring a specialisation to the table."

WT: How useful is the term human capital?

Ciaran Fenton, CEO, Executive Equity "I object to the term human capital management. You can't own people in the way that a business own assets. We need new models for the 21st century for managing people. People are complex; they cannot be treated like a process or a widget.
Andrew Law, general manager, HR, Bradford & Bingley "It's a difficult position for HR - we have to be the custodian of values, of treating people respectfully, we have to be successful business operators too – there can be a conflict between those two places."
Stephen Quant, director, Skanska Rashleigh "Job titles and languages can be used to create different perceptions and effects. At a tribunal I always describe myself as an employee, never as a director."

WT: So is it possible to quantify the value people bring to an organisation?

Alun Griffiths, group HR director, Atkins “The attempt to quantify any kind of ‘Investment’ is powerful, and that must include investment in people. It should be viewed in the same was as a pharmaceutical company invests in its pipeline of products. There may be several good reasons for implementing a new HR initiative, but unless there's at least one good business idea, you probably shouldn’t do it."
Wooding "What you measure is their knowledge and skills and what impact does that have on a company when they walk out the door. "
Fenton "The big issue is employee engagement - the majority of senior people leave 40% of their talent at the office reception desk every day. If you brought all of your personality to work you would probably get the sack."

WT: How can organisations engage with their people?

Brian Benneyworth, HR director, Inchcape Automotive "We were an entrepreneurial business recently bought by Inchcape; their team went out on the road with our people. The success of this was phenomenal. The benefits to the new company could be directly seen by the staff who could compare this behaviour with the way that they were treated before. By being open, honest and willing to listen, you can achieve a lot."
Wooding "We're currently trying to understand senior managers' behaviours, their attitudes and personalities. Our senior managers keep recruiting in their own mould "because we’re really good aren't we?" We don’t need to know about their intellectual capabilities or skills, they’re a given. They wouldn’t have got to where they are, otherwise."
Fenton "Rather than be really formulaic about this, it’s a question of getting to know people. The problem is that it takes a lot of time, and that’s a serious investment.”

WT: How do you identify and encourage best behaviours?

Quant "We have commercial appraisals every month. It’s not a case of having big rounds of redundancy programmes; it’s a process that’s ongoing all the time."
Wooding “We presented our assessment programme [to Smith’s group senior management] as a means of them getting better people. The two axes by which we measure people are performance and behaviour.”
Fenton “We’re living in a post-industrial era and we’re still working with Victorian models of business measurement. We have to try and find a new system. Demos says that organisations should try and loosen up.”
Benneyworth "But there need to be parameters and people need to know what the boundaries of acceptable behaviour are”.
Griffiths "Our company [Atkins] is largely made up of engineers - all very left-brain - and there’s a very high perceived need for order. We have a phrase in our organisation 'corporate untidiness', which is a state we promote to try and accommodate the difficult, creative people, that we want to employ."

WT: Can behaviours be changed when company values change?

Law “We have turned over our senior management team in dramatic numbers. Mutuality carries with it a set of brand values and overnight we became a plc. Our whole set of values had to shift. Some were ready for it and others wanted to stay in the past. We did a huge amount of data collection on the senior team, including 360 degree evaluations, and psychometric tests. We found that data was consistent across all and we rarely got contra indications, which gave me a lot of confidence in the bought-in tests.”
Sue Crozier, HR and development director, FirstChoice Holidays "We’ve just come through a period of great change. Previously we worked in secure silos within the business, retail, airline reservations and operators. If you looked at the objectives, we worked against each other a lot, our business units were very inter-competitive. So we’ve embarked on a programme of collaborative and shared working, where the focus was on shared experience, skills and tacit knowledge across the business units. This has brought a lot of insecurity to senior management, because it does affect the performance of their business units. For example, there are situations where tour operators may have to take a hit in a scenario that would benefit the overall business objectives better and to do it with good grace.”

WT: How can the right talent be recruited?

Law "This is where the power of the employer brand lies - when competition for good people is very high. Our headquarters is located in an area, which makes us one of the region’s biggest employers, but we still wanted to attract only the talented people. Our scale works for us. We were an organisation of 7,000 but have scaled back to 3,500. Previously when I worked for HSBC, wherever you worked within that organisation, you could never see the top of the mountain, there were always another five ridges in the way. If you come to the Bradford & Bingley as a middle manager, you can get your arms around it and see your way to the top.”
Fenton "We need new models for doing this. Take Greg Dyke and the BBC. Is an organisation only as good as their last HR director of CEO? The average CEO lasts four to five years in today’s business environment.”

The Panel

	Sophie Relf	– Facilitator and Workthing head of marketing
	Barbara Oldridge	– HR director, Research International, (services marketing)
	Michael Short	– Director, Learning Cortex, (e-Learning company)
	Amanda Wooding	– Director, people development, Smiths Group, (manufacturing and engineering)
	Ciaran Fenton	– CEO, Executive Equity, (search organisation)
	Andrew Law	– General manager, HR, Bradford & Bingley, (financial services)
	Stephen Quant	– Director, Skanska Rashleigh, (oil and gas)
	Alun Griffiths	– Group HR director, Atkins Plc, (engineering)
	Brian Benneyworth	– HR director, Inchcape Retail (automotive)
	Sue Crozier	– HR and development director, FirstChoice Holidays (travel)